


home, on her own

by fluffysfics



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Flashbacks, Introspection, it’s my usual brand of ‘capitalise on one line from the show and make it sad’, past relationship, set between Spyfall and Fugitive, sort of a character study?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:48:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24113809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffysfics/pseuds/fluffysfics
Summary: “Is that where you go, when you leave us to explore and you say you’ll be back in an hour and you never are? Are you out looking for him? Where do you go?”In which the Doctor takes a trip home, and visits some familiar sights.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 49





	home, on her own

“Go on! Go explore! Biggest sweet shop in the universe- they’ve got a whole _village_ full of jelly babies. Brilliant!” The Doctor flaps her hands at her companions, who are all shooting her slightly dubious looks. This is the third time in two weeks that she’s done this, she realises, and the bright smile on her face becomes just a little harder to maintain. 

“Where are _you_ off to?” Yaz folds her arms, ever-perceptive. She reminds the Doctor far too much of herself. 

“I’ve got some maintenance to do. Nothin’ serious- just can’t have you lot around in case something goes wrong. Go on! Go! I’ll meet you all in the jelly baby village in an hour. Couldn’t keep me away from that place if you tried.” She grins wider, rocking back onto her heels. 

Her companions don’t look entirely convinced, but Graham shrugs, and Ryan shakes his head in a way that suggests _giving up_ more than _believing her_. Yaz looks like she wants to object further, but Ryan pulls her away, muttering something that sounds a lot like ‘don’t bother’. 

The Doctor wonders when she became the sort of person that her companions couldn’t trust. 

She doesn’t allow it to bother her for too long, the cheery smile fading as she turns back to her ship. The TARDIS hums disapprovingly at her, because of course she already knows what the Doctor intends to do. 

“Sorry,” she mumbles, patting the console, and there’s a vague beeping sound in return that definitely means ‘apology accepted, but only because you’re in pain’. “Scan for him again, would you?” 

It’s been all of two hours since the TARDIS last did this exact scan, but she obeys anyway. Just as it always does, it comes up blank. Not a trace of the Master anywhere. The Doctor sighs, flipping switches on the console and pulling the lever that sends her ricocheting off into the time vortex. She must remember to keep her landing a little tighter when she comes back this time. Leaving her fam in an admittedly very pretty, but not entirely alien-free, cave system for two days had not endeared her to them very much at all. 

She lands, and crosses to the doors, and flings them open. Gallifrey burns in front of her, and she wonders when the fires in the Capitol will go out. The smell of the air is so achingly _familiar_ , but tinged now with the acrid scent of ash and smoke. 

The Doctor closes her eyes, and tips her head back up to the burnt-orange sky. The light from the twin suns is so, so warm on her face; for a moment, on the exhale, when she doesn’t have to smell the fires, she can almost pretend like she’s home and nothing is wrong. But it can’t last for more than a second or two; she slips her hand into her pocket, rubs her thumb against the communication device that the Master had left with her. 

It’s been a few days since she’s searched the ruins west of the Capitol. Might as well start there. 

Honestly, she’s not quite sure what she expects to find. Someone still alive? The Master, stalking around in the wreckage? A clue as to what his cryptic words about the _Timeless Child_ had meant? 

She knows those words. She doesn’t know why she knows those words, and it feels like the mystery of it is going to eat her alive. 

The Doctor wanders through what had once been part of a town; people’s homes, the occasional shop, a nice old woman who made robes. She’d been a woman when the Doctor was a little boy, anyway; who knew what she’d be now? 

_Dead_ , her brain helpfully supplies. 

She walks on quickly from that area, moving closer to the Capitol. Amidst the rubble, the faint shapes of familiar streets are still visible. Wide, grand avenues, and smaller alleyways that she’d been so intimately familiar with as a wayward child, and as an equally (if not _more_ ) wayward young man. She reaches out, rubs her hand along a section of wall that’s still standing- to waist height, at least. The rest of it lies scattered around like it had taken a direct hit from something nasty. 

_“Hurry up, Koschei! He’ll catch us!”_

_“I’m going as fast as I can, Theta. Unlike you, I’m carrying all my schoolbooks.”_

_“Why’d you bring schoolbooks? I told you we were sneaking out today!”_

_“You never know, I might find a chance to do some reading.”_

_“You’re so boring, all that reading. Good thing you’re cute!”_

The Doctor shakes her head, like that would help to clear the memory. Hiding in this very alleyway, stifling giggles as Borusa furiously searched for the two of them. Oh, she’d been _so_ painfully in love back then. Koschei had been her moon and stars, and she knew she’d been his. 

She resists the urge to sit down. If she sits, the Doctor doesn’t know how long it’ll be until she gets up. This self isn’t very good at crying, but it certainly isn’t beyond staring blankly at walls and letting miserable thoughts spiral around and around for what usually feels like forever. 

Instead, she turns away. One day, she’ll make herself go inside the Capitol. See what the Master has made of the Panopticon, the Matrix chamber, all those hallowed hallways full of ominous statues of long-regenerated- and now long- _dead_ \- Time Lords. That day is not today. 

The Doctor makes her way back through the town, picking past wrecked houses as best she can. For all the destruction, all the ruin, there are no bodies. She noticed that on her second visit here. No doubt the Master has dumped them all somewhere. Another reason she was dreading entering the Capitol; if they were anywhere, they’d be there. 

She wonders how long it took him to do all of this, to raze everything so thoroughly to the ground. To kill every living soul on the planet, and bring them all to...wherever he’d brought them. She wonders if he’d gone after the High Council, too, after her last self had exiled them. 

She’s so caught up in her thoughts that her foot slips, going right through a several-inch-thick layer of ashes. The Doctor catches herself, pulling her foot out of the pile. Her boot is unpleasantly grey, and there’s now a perfect shoe-shaped hole in what was probably once someone’s living room. 

“Sorry,” she murmurs to no one in particular, picking her way more carefully through the rest of the ruins. 

Eventually the buildings fade out, and she reaches the fields. Acres and acres of red grass. It’s patchy now, as if the Master in his fury had hurled firebombs at it randomly. She wouldn’t put that past him. 

The Doctor sits down in one of the patches that are still intact. She takes her boot off, pulling up a handful of grass and using it to wipe away the ash. She couldn’t very well go back to her companions with the burned remains of her home planet staining her clothes, after all. As it was, she’d probably at least change her coat. Everything here stank of ash and smoke, and she knew she would too by the time she left. 

For now, she lies back in the grass. It’s faintly cooling, even with sunlight beaming down onto her front. 

_“Told you skipping school was a good idea.”_

_“And I told you I’d find a chance to read.”_

_“I think there’s something else you’d much rather be doing out here.”_

_“What’s that, Theta?”_

_“Me?”_

The Doctor snaps her eyes back open again, presses her palms against them until the scene fades. That’s the last thing she needs to be thinking about. She wasn’t sure if that was a memory from the same day as earlier, or from another time; they’d done this same thing on so many different occasions, skipped class and spent their day running through the fields, talking, laughing, doing things that were _highly_ inappropriate for two young Prydonians to engage in. 

Those memories are locked away somewhere soft in her head, somewhere she doesn’t visit very often. She rarely feels content enough to look them over without _hurting_. There had been a few times, back when she’d had Missy in the Vault, where the ache that came with viewing them had been almost sweet, instead of just bitter. But Missy had betrayed her, and now the Master seemed to be going out of his way to drive as many knives through her hearts as possible. 

She misses O. She wonders, not for the first time, where all of his kind words had come from if not a place of sincerity. Surely not all of them could have been sent while the Master was sat there grinning, enjoying her misery, thinking about how much she was going to hurt when she found out what he’d done. 

The Doctor lets herself look out over Gallifrey again. No, she thinks. Even if a few of the Master’s words to her as O were genuine, nothing excuses this. Nothing could possibly justify burning their home to the ground. 

Could it? 

Oh, she hates that she doesn’t know. She hates that some tiny part of her still implicitly trusts the Master’s judgement, thinks that if he saw Gallifrey fit to be burned, then they must have deserved it. It’s the part of her that’s still eighty years old, with curly blond hair and shining brown eyes and a smile full of nothing but love for his genius best friend. No matter how hard she tries, that little Theta Sigma part of her refuses to shut up. 

The Doctor gazes at the smoking ruins of the Capitol until she can’t stand her own company for one second longer. She does this every time, like she half expects the Master to pop up if she waits around long enough. He never does. 

She stands, and walks back to her TARDIS. Her ship greets her with gentle concern, and she brushes it off in favour of shrugging her coat to the floor, running a hand through her hair, and taking herself back to her fam. Only an hour and a half later than she’d promised to meet them. Could be worse. 

The Doctor fixes a smile onto her lips, and walks out to face Ryan, Graham, and Yaz. 

She tries not to think about how she’s already wondering when she’ll next be able to give them the slip, next be able to trawl through those ruins in search of things that probably don’t even exist. Oh, the Master would be _delighted_ if he knew what he was doing to her. 

——

A month later, the Master lands on Gallifrey. He is dishevelled, he is _starving_ , his ratty old stolen spaceship is in ruins. He parks (crashes) it on a cliff somewhere it won’t be noticed, and he stumbles down to the Capitol to steal a TARDIS so that he can gather supplies for his revenge plan. 

He gets to the outskirts of the surrounding town when he notices a footprint in the ashes. Weary, irrational thoughts go first to a lone survivor- but no, that was impossible, he had been _thorough_. Which meant...

The Master kneels almost reverently on the scorched ground, and touches his fingertips gently to the middle of the footprint. It’s her. It has to be her. 

He laughs, sudden and manic, and leans back. Hands drag down his face, and now there are streaks of ash across his left eye, and he doesn’t care in the slightest. 

The thought of the Doctor traipsing through these ruins alone fills his hearts with- 

Fucking hell, it doesn’t make him nearly as happy as it ought to. He’s _won_. He’s broken her. Reduced her to a ghost in her own home- not _really_ her home, he reminds himself bitterly-, wandering through ruins in search of something she’ll never find. 

And yet, the Master feels like he’s the one who’s been shattered, deep down. He’s lost the only person he’d ever truly loved, because how could she consider him her equal now? The moment she finds out the truth, she will see him as pathetic, as worthless, as the broken mess of a person held together only by shards of _her_ that he really is. 

There’s only one solution. Break her right back, even harder. 

He straightens up, looks towards the smoking mess surrounding the Matrix chamber where his final grand plan will take place, and stamps the Doctor’s footprint out of existence. 

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact, the last section of this came to me very late last night and I wrote it in about five minutes- it was VERY full of typos when I came to edit it today.. 
> 
> hope you enjoyed! comments and kudos very much appreciated as always <3


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